This invention relates to a process for making a wearing article destined to be thrown away after a single use such as a disposable diaper and this process to make the wearing article includes a step of bonding an elastically stretchable string-like member to such wearing article.
Conventionally, securing of a string-like member such as rubber strings to a wearing article of this type has often been achieved using an appropriate adhesive. In general, a sheet material such as nonwoven fabric forming the wearing article has been coated on its surface with the adhesive over a desired width or the thread-like member has been coated on its surface with the adhesive intermittently in a longitudinal or a circumferential direction.
In the background of the former art, the width over which the sheet material is coated with an adhesive is preferably as narrow as possible in order to avoid an anxiety that a flexibility of the sheet material might be reduced by a cured adhesive. However, on the production line along which both the sheet material and the elastically stretchable string-like member are fed into the machine generally at such a high speed as to make it difficult to accurately control the position of these sheet material and elastically stretchable member, reduction of the width over which the sheet material should be coated with the adhesive is inevitably limited. In other words, this process is always accompanied by the problem that the flexibility of the sheet material may be reduced over a width substantially larger than the width of the string-like member itself. Such problem is particularly serious in the wearing article using a plurality of string-like members extending in parallel one to another.
In the latter case in which the string-like member is coated with the adhesive intermittently in its longitudinal direction, the adhesive applied surface of the string-like member may not properly face the sheet material to which the thread-like member should be bonded so far as the string-like member is running and oscillating at a high speed. Thus it is difficult to reliably bond the string-like member to the sheet material.